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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

Recently I have been asked by several customer organizations to help them to understand how to account for the expense of agile software development. In particular, incremental delivery of solutions into production or the marketplace seem to be causing confusion with the financial people within these organizations. The details of accounting rules vary between countries, but the fundamentals are common. In order to get properly account for the costs incurred by software development teams you need to keep track of the amount of work performed and the type of work performed to develop a given solution. Time tracking doesn't have to be complex: at one customer developers spend less than five minutes a week capturing such information.

Why is Time Tracking Potentially Valuable?

There are several financial issues to be aware of:

Capitalization. For public companies capital expenses (CapEx) can potentially boost book value through the increase in assets (in this case a software-based solution) and increase in net income (due to lower operating expenses that year). On the other hand, operational expenses (OpEx) are accounted for in the year that they occur and thereby reduce net income which in turn reduces your organization's taxes for that year.

Matching. One of the goals of good accounting is to accurately reflect the net income of the enterprise and to prevent income manipulation or "smoothing". As such a key tenet is the principle of matching revenues with the appropriate expenses. For software this means that we expense the cost of the software over the lifetime of the asset against the income at that time. An implication of this is that capitalizing software development, when appropriate, before the software goes into production clearly violates the matching principle since there is no benefit of the asset until such time.

Tax Credits. In some countries you can even get tax credits for forms of software development that are research and development (R&D) in nature.

The point is that the way that a software developer's work is accounted for can have a non-trivial impact upon your organization's financial position.

I don't understand what you're asking (5% of responses, one of which was mine so that I could test the poll)

The poll results reveal that we have a long way to go. Of the people inputting their time more of them believed it was a waste of time than understood it to be a valuable activity. When you stop and think about it, the investment of five minutes a week to track your time could potentially save or even earn your organization many hundreds of dollars. Looking at it from a dollar per minute point of view, it could be the highest value activity that a developer performs in a given week.

The discussion that ensued regarding the poll was truly interesting. Although there were several positive postings, and several neutral ones, many more were negative when it came to time tracking. Some comments that stood out for me included:

It's a colossal waste of time unless you're billing a customer by the hour.

We record time spent on new development work (as distinct from other tasks such as bug fixing in legacy code and so on) as this is capitalised as an asset and depreciated.

I think the *most* pointless example was where the managers told us what we should be putting in.

One day we will move past the "just do it" mentality and have some meaningful conversations and the reasons for what we do.

In my experience time tracking is a massive waste... of time. It's a poor substitute for management.

Why do you need to know more than the info available through Sprint Backlog, Sprint burndown and the daily standup?

Some of my teams (I am SM for three teams) are skeptical about this. They do not think that keeping track of task hours this way will be any more useful than the daily standup reports. And they do not believe that Management can resist the temptation to use task hours as a measure.

I think that there are several interesting implications from this discussion:

Agilists need to become more enterprise aware. It's clear to be really effective that agile delivery teams need a better understanding of the bigger picture, including mundane things such as tax implications of what they're doing. In Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) this is something that we refer to as being enterprise aware. There's far more to enterprise awareness than understanding pertinent accounting principles, for interest disciplined agile teams work towards a common technology roadmap and common business roadmap, but appreciating why time tracking is a potentially valuable activity would be a good start.

Management needs to communicate better. It's also clear that management needs to communicate more effectively regarding why they're asking people to track their time. To be fair, management themselves might not be aware of the tax implications themselves so may not be making effective use of the time data they're asking for.

Management needs to govern more effectively. Several people were clearly concerned about how management was going to use the time data (by definition they are measures) which could be a symptom of both poor communication as well as poor governance (unfortunately many developers have experiences where measures have been used against them, a failure of governance, and no longer trust their management teams to do the right thing as a result).

Time tracking should be streamlined. It was obvious from the conversation that several people worked in organizations where the time tracking effort had gotten completely out of hand. Spending 5 minutes a week is ok, and to be quite blunt should be more than sufficient, but spending fifteen minutes or more a day doing so is far too much. Over the years I've helped organizations design measurement programs and I've seen a lot of well-intention efforts become incredibly onerous and expensive for the people they were inflicted upon. I suspect it's time for a reality check in some of these organizations people were alluding to. A good heuristic is that for any measurement you should be able to indicate the real cost of collecting it, the use(s) that the information is being put to, and the value resulting from those uses. If you can't quickly and coherently do that then you need to take a hard look at why you continue to collect that metric. The lament "we might need it one day" is a symptom that you're wasting time and money.

Agile rhetoric is getting in the way. Some of the team-focused agile practices, such as burndown charts (or better yet ranged burndown charts) and stand up meetings may be preventing people from becoming enterprise aware because they believe that all of their management needs are being met by them.

You may be missing out on the benefits of time tracking. Many organizations are potentially leaving money on the table by not being aware of the implications of how to expense software development.

Parting Thoughts

Disciplined agilists are enterprise aware. This is important for two reasons: First, you want to optimize your organizational whole instead of sub-optimize on project-related efforts; second, you can completely miss opportunities to add real value for your organization. In the anecdote I provided it was clear that many agile developers believe that an activity such as time tracking is a waste when that clearly doesn't have to be the case. Worse yet, although someone brought up the issues around capitalizing software development expenses early in the conversation a group of very smart and very experienced people still missed this easy opportunity to see how they could add value to their organization.

Granted, time tracking on an agile project team is nowhere near as sexy as topics such as continuous integration (CI), TDD, the definition of done, continous architecture, or many more. But you know what? Although it's a mind-numbingly mundane issue it is still an important one. 'Nuff said (I hope).

I've been getting a lot of questions lately about applying the acceleration metric in practice. So, here's some answers to frequently asked questions:1. How do I monetize acceleration? This is fairly straightforward to do. For example, assume your acceleration is 0.007 (0.7%), there are five people on the team, your annual burdened cost per person is $150,000, and you have two week iterations. All these numbers are made up, but you know how to calculate acceleration now and IT management had darn well better know the average burdened cost (salary plus overhead) of their staff. So, per iteration the average burdened cost per person must be $150,000/26 = $5,770. Productivity improvement per iteration for this team must be $5,770 * 5 * .007 = $202. If the acceleration stayed constant at 0.7% the overall productivity improvement for the year would be (1.007)^26 (assuming the team works all 52 weeks of the year) which would be 1.198 or 19.8%. This would be a savings of $148,500 (pretty much the equivalent of one new person). Of course a 20% productivity increase over an entire year is a really aggressive improvement, regardless of some of the claims made by the agile snake oil salesman out there, although at 10-15% increase is a reasonable expectation. What I'd really want to do is calculate the acceleration for the year by comparing the velocity from the beginning of the year to the end of the year (in Western cultures I'd want to avoid comparing iterations near to the holidays). So, if the team velocity the first week of February 2008 was 20 points, now the same team's velocity the first week of February 2009 was 23 points, that's an acceleration of (23-20)/20 = 15% over a one year period, for a savings of $112,500.2. Is acceleration really unitless? For the sake of comparison it is. The "units" are % change in points per iteration, or % change in points per time period depending on the way that you want to look at it. Because it's a percentage I can easily monetize it, as you see above, and use it as a basis of comparison. 3. How do I convince teams to share their data? This can be difficult. Because acceleration is easy to calculate for agile teams, and because it's easy to use to compare teams (my team has .7% acceleration whereas other teams down the hall from mine have accelerations of .3% and -.2% of teams), people are concerned that this metric will be used against them. OK, to be fair, my team might be OK with this. ;-) Seriously though, this is a valid fear that will only be addressed by an effective governance program based on enablement, collaboration, and trust instead of the traditional command-and-control approach. Management's track record regarding how they've used measurements in the past, and how they've governed in general, have a great effect on people's willingness to trust them with new metrics such as acceleration. The implication is that you need to build up trust, something that could take years if it's possible at all.4. Why does this work for agile teams? Agile teams are self organizing, and an implication of that is that they will be held accountable for their estimates. Because of this accountability, and because velocity is a vital input into their planning and estimation efforts, agile teams are motivated to calculate their velocity accurately and to track it over time. Because they're eager to get their velocity right, and because acceleration is based on velocity, there's an exceptionally good chance that it's accurate.5. What about function points or similar productivity measures? Function points can be calculated for projects being developed via an agile approach, or other approaches for that matter, but it's a very expensive endeavor compared to calculating acceleration (which is essentially free) and likely will be seen as a bureaucratic overhead by the development team. My rule of thumb is that if you're not being explicitly paid to count function points (for example the US DoD will often pay contracting companies to create estimates based on function point counts) then I wouldn't bother with them.6. What about calculating acceleration for iterative project teams? Iterative project teams, perhaps following Rational Unified Process (RUP), can choose to calculate and track their velocity and thereby their acceleration. The key is to allow the team to be self organizing and accountable for their estimates, which in turn motivates them to get their velocity right just like agile teams (RUP can be as agile as you want to make it, don't let anyone tell you differently).7. What about calculating acceleration for traditional project teams? In theory this should work, in practice it is incredibly unlikely. Traditional teams don't work in iterations where working software is produced on a regular basis, they're typically not self organizing, and therefore there really isn't any motivate to calculate velocity (even if they do, there is little motivation to get it right). Without knowing the velocity you can't calculate acceleration. If you can't trust the velocity estimate, and I certainly wouldn't trust a traditional team's velocity estimate, then you can't trust your acceleration calculation. So, my fall back position to calculate productivity improvement would be to do something like function point counting (which is expensive and difficult to compare between teams due to different fudge factors used by different FP counters) and then looking at change in FPs delivered over time.8. How can I apply this across a department? It is fairly straightforward to roll up the acceleration of project teams into an overall acceleration measure for a portfolio of teams simply by taking a weighted average based on team size. However, this is only applicable to teams that are in a position to report an accurate acceleration (the agile and iterative teams) and of course are willing to do so.9. What does a negative acceleration tell me? If the acceleration is negative then productivity on the team is going down, likely an indicator of quality and/or team work problems. However, you don't want to manage by the numbers so you should talk to the team to see what's actually going on.10. What does a zero acceleration tell me? This is an indication that the team's productivity is not increasing, and that perhaps they should consider doing retrospectives at the end of each iteration and then acting on the results from those retrospectives. Better yet they can "dial up" their process improvement efforts by adopting something along the lines of IBM Rational Self Check.Further reading:

Although it might not be obvious, and important success factor in adopting agile techniques is to be able to determine whether a team is agile or not. The challenge that many organizations face is that many teams will claim to be agile, yet management, who often has little or no experience with agile approaches, cannot tell which claims are true and which are over zealous (I'm being polite). The following are the criteria that I suggest you look for in a disciplined agile team:1. Produce working software on a regular basis. This is one of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto, and in my experience is a critical differentiator between the teams that are agile and those that are merely claiming it. Ideally the team should produce potentially shippable software each iteration. That doesn't mean that they'll deploy the system into production, or the marketplace, each iteration but they could if required to do so. Typically the team will deploy into a pre-production testing environment or a demo enviroment at the end of each iteration (or more often for that matter).2. Do continuous regression testing, and better yet take a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Agile developers test their work to the best of their ability, minimally doing developer regression testing via a continuous integration (CI) strategy and better yet do developer-level TDD. This approach enables development teams to find defects early, thereby reducing the average cost of addressing the defects, it also helps them to deliver higher quality code and to move forward safely when adding or changing functionality.3. Work closely with their stakeholders, ideally on a daily basis. A common practice of agile teams is to have an on-site customer or product owner who prioritizes requirements and provides information on a timely manner to the team. Disciplined agile teams take it one step further and follow the practice active stakeholder participation where the stakeholders get actively involved with modeling and sometimes even development.4. Are self-organizing within a governance framework. Agile teams are self-organizing, which means that the people doing the work determines how the work will be done, they're not told by a manager who may not even be directly involved with the work how it will be done. In other words the team does its own planning, including scheduling and estimation. Disciplined agile teams are self governing within an effective governance framework.5. Regularly reflect on how they work together and then act to improve on their findings. Most agile teams hold a short meeting at the end of each iteration to reflect upon how well things are working and how they could potentially improve the way that they are working together. Sometimes this is done in a more formalized manner in the form of a retrospective, but often it's done informally. The team then acts on one or more of their suggested improvements the next iteration. Disciplined agile teams take this one step further and measure their software process improvement (SPI) progress over time: the act of taking these measures, perhaps via a product such as Rational Self Check, helps to keep the team on track in their SPI efforts.

I have yet to discover an ad-hoc development team which met all five criteria, and most of them rarely meet two or three.

A common goal of IT governance is to determine the productivity of various techniques, tools, and people as part of the overall effort to improve said productivity. If you can easily measure productivity you can easily identify what is working for you in given situations, or what is not working for you, and adjust accordingly. A common question that customers ask me is how do you measure productivity on agile teams. Although you could use traditional strategies such as function point (FP) counting, or another similar strategy, this can require a lot of effort in practice. Remember that we don't only want to measure productivity, we want to do so easily. Ideally it would be nice to do so using information already being generated by the team and therefore we won't add any additional bureaucratic overhead.

A common metric captured by agile teams is their velocity. Velocity is an agile measure of how much work a team can do during a given iteration. At the beginning of an iteration a team will estimate the work that they're about to do in terms of points. At the beginning of a project the team will formulate a point system, which typically takes a few iterations to stabilize, so that they can consistently estimate the work each iteration. Although the point system is arbitrary, my team might estimate that a given work item is two points worth of effort whereas your team might think that it's seven points of effort, the important thing is that it's consistent. So if there is another work item requiring similar effort, my team should estimate that it's two points and your team seven points. With a consistent point system in place, each team can accurately estimate the amount of work that they can do in the current iteration by assuming that they can achieve the same amount of work as last iteration (an XP concept called "yesterday's weather"). So, if my team delivered 27 points of functionality last iteration we would reasonably assume that we can do the same this iteration.

So, is it possible to use velocity as a measure of productivity? The answer is not directly. For example, we have two teams, A and B, each of 5 people and each working on a web site and each having two-week long iterations. Team A reports a velocity of 17 points for their current iteration and team B a velocity of 51 points. They're both comprised of 5 people, therefore team B must be three times (51/17) as productive as team A. No! You can't compare the velocity of the two teams because they're measuring in different units. Team A is reporting in their points and B in their points, so you can't compare them directly, The traditional strategy would be to ask the teams to use the same unit of points, which might be a viable strategy with two teams although likely not if you have twenty agile teams and particularly not if you have two hundred teams. Regardless of the number of teams that you have it would minimally require some coordination to normalize the units and perhaps even some training and development and support of velocity calculation guidelines. Sounds like unnecessary bureaucracy that I would prefer to avoid. Worse yet, so-called "consistent" measurements such as FPs are anything but because there's always some sort of fudge factor involved in the process which will vary by individual estimator.

An easier solution exists. Instead of comparing velocities you instead calculate the acceleration of each team. For example, consider the reported velocities of each team below. Team A's velocity is increasing over time whereas team B's velocity is trending downwards. All things being equal, you can assume that team A's productivity is increasing whereas B's is decreasing. Of course it's not wise to manage simply by the numbers, so instead of assuming what is going on I would rather go and talk with the people on the two teams. Doing so I might find out that team A has adopted quality-oriented practices such as continuous integration and static code analysis which team B has not, indicating that I might want to help team B adopt these practices and hopefully increase their productivity.

There are several advantages to using acceleration as an indicator of productivity over traditional techniques such as FP counting:1. It's easy to calculate. For example, the acceleration of team A from iteration 1 to iteration 6 is (20-17)/17 = 0.176 whereas for team B it is (45-51)/51 = -.118. Of course, you don't need to calculate the acceleration over such a long period of time, you could do it iteration by iteration, although I find that doing it over several iterations gives a more accurate value. You'll need to experiment to determine what works for you.2. It is inexpensive. Acceleration is based on information already being collected by the team, their velocity, so there is no extra work to be done by the team. 3. It is unlikely to be gamed. Teams aren't motivated to fake their velocity because it provides them with important information required to manage themselves effectively. 4. It is easy to automate. For example, Rational Team Concert (RTC) calculates velocity automatically from its work item list (an extension of Scrum's product backlog) and does trend reporting via it's web-based project reporting functionality, providing a visual representation of the team's acceleration (or deceleration as the case may be).5. It offers the opportunity for more effective governance. This approach reflects three of the practices of Lean Development Governance: Simple and Relevant Metrics, Continuous Project Monitoring, and Integrated Lifecycle Environment.6. You can easily adjust for changing team size. If the size of a team varies over time, and it will, this metric falls apart the way that I've described it. To address this issue you need to normalize it by dividing by the number of people on the team to get the average acceleration per team member.7. You can easily monetize this metric. By knowing the acceleration of the project team and knowing how much they're spending each iteration, you can estimate the amount of money you're saving through process improvement. For example, if you're spending $100,000 per iteration and your acceleration is 2%, your cost savings is $2,000 per iteration.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are a few potential disadvantages:1. It is an indirect measure of productivity. Truth be told velocity really is a productivity measure, it's just that because it's measured in different units it's difficult to compare between teams. Acceleration is merely an indicator of the change in productivity.2. You actually need to measure what you're interested in. When you step back and think about it, you're not really interested in measuring your productivity, regardless of what the metrics wonks have been telling you the past few decades. In this case what you really want to know is your change in productivity because your real goal is to improve your productivity over time, which is what acceleration actually measures.3. Management must be flexible. For this to be acceptable senior management must be willing to think outside the "traditional metrics box". Using a non-standard, simple metric to calculate productivity? Preposterous! Directly measuring what you're truly interested in instead of calculating trends over long periods of time? Doubly preposterous!4. Your existing measurement program may be questioned. Once management learns how easy it can be to obtain metrics which enables them to truly govern software development projects they may begin to question the investment that they've made in the past in overly complex and expensive metrics schemes. This can be dangerous for the metrics professionals in your organization, particularly if your metrics group doesn't have valid measurements around the value of their own work. Ummmmm....5. The terminology sounds scientific. Terms such as velocity and acceleration can motivate some of us to start believing that we understand the "laws of IT physics", something which I doubt very highly that as an industry we understand. All it would take is for someone to start throwing around terms like "standard theory" and "unified model" and we'd really be in trouble. Wait a minute..... ;-)

In summary, measuring the acceleration of development teams is an easy to collect, straightforward measure of team productivity. I hope that I've given you some food for thought, and would be eager to hear about your experiences applying this metric in practice.

Although I'm obviously biased as I was involved with its creation, the poster includes some really good information about how to scale agile software development practices effectively. It summarizes the scaling factors, such as large teams, distribution, regulatory compliance, application complexity, and so on that you should be concerned with. It also presents a full agile software development lifecycle that goes beyond the construction focused lifecycles of common "agile in the small" processes. It also summarizes the practices of lean development governance, giving you some insight into how to govern your IT environment more effectively.

I think it's a pretty good poster that's worth checking out. It's free, so it's hard to argue with the price. Most importantly, it would look pretty good hanging on your office wall.

In my previous blog posting, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/ambler?entry=strategies_for_distributed_agile_teams , I overviewed several strategies for improving your effectiveness at geographically distributed development (GDD). Those strategies were fairly generic and directly applicable to both traditional and agile development teams. In this posting I focus on strategies which are more agile in nature, although they could also be applied to more traditional approaches as well. These strategies are:

1. Get the whole team together at the beginning of the project. Your goals are to build rapport amongst the team, to get to know the people that you’re working with to facilitate communication later on, and to better understand the situation on the ground. The implication is that you will need to fly some people around, increasing your initial expenses, an investment that many organizations balk at. The reality is that you will eventually end up paying for travel anyway, either because you actually flew people around or because your communication costs are higher throughout the project. In short, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.

2. Organize your team around the system architecture. The most effective way to organize a distributed team is around the architecture of the system that you are building, not around the job functions of the people involved. In other words, if your team is in Toronto, Rome, and Bangalore then each subteam should be responsible for one or more subsystems. It would be a mistake to organize the teams around job function, for example to have the architects and analysts in Toronto, the developers in Rome, and the testers in Bangalore because this structure would require significantly more documentation and other forms of communication to coordinate the teams, increasing both cost and risk. As I mentioned in my previous blog posting you will need to invest in some initial architecture envisioning at the beginning of a project to identify the subsystems and their public interfaces, and that to do that you’ll also need to do some initial requirements envisioning to drive this architecture effort. I suggest that you take an Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) approach to this to enable you to gain the value from modeling without the costs and risks associated with up-front comprehensive modeling and documentation that get many traditional project teams in trouble.

3. Have “daily stand-up meetings”. A common practice on co-located agile teams is to have daily stand-up meetings where people share the status of what they did yesterday, what they intend to do today, and whether they’re running into any problems. These short meetings enable team coordination. Distributed teams can do this as well, the people in a given geographical location can hold local stand-up meetings and then representatives from each location can hold a shared meeting to coordinate the subteams. Whereas local stand-up meetings are held first thing in the morning, distributed daily stand-up meetings may need to be held at unusual times so as to include people at distant locations.

4. Have Ambassadors. Ambassadors are people who travel between sites, often technically senior people or senior business experts, to share information between the subteams. Getting the team together at the beginning of the project sets the foundation for communication, but without continual investment in maintaining effective collaboration between teams you run the risk of your subteams deviating from the overall strategy. These are typically short engagements, a week or two in length, because of the pressures it puts on the people doing the actual traveling. The implication is that you’ll have several people flying between sites at any given time on a reasonable rotation schedule. Because you’ll have some people flying around, your local team rooms should accommodate visitors by having one or more desks available for them to use when they’re visiting.

5. Have Boundary Spanners. A boundary spanner is someone who is located on site who focuses on enabling communication between subteams as well as within their subteam. On large distributed teams you’ll find that you have three flavors of boundary spanners – team leaders who take on project management responsibilities on the subteam, product owners who are responsible for representing the business within the subteam, and architecture owners responsible for technical direction on the team. These boundary spanners will work closely with their peers, having regular coordination meetings across all subteams as well as impromptu one-on-one meetings to deal with specific issues between individual subteams.

6. Ensure that the global team gets the credit it deserves. In both offshoring and nearshoring environments it’s common to see small teams in North America or Europe driving the efforts of significantly larger teams in another country. Yet, at the end of the project it always seems as if the smaller team, often because they work for the direct customer, gets the lion’s share of the credit – unless of course the project failed, then the subcontracting team often seems to get virtually all of the “credit”. This clearly isn’t fair, and it clearly doesn’t promote effective teamwork between the subteams in the future.

7. Take a lean approach to development governance. As I’ve written in the past, effective governance is based on enablement and collaboration instead of the traditional approaches of management and control. Good governance measures progress through regular delivery of working software, not through status reports or delivery of detailed specifications. Good governance is based on the idea of having a living process which changes to reflect lessons learned as your project progresses. In a previous blog posting at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/ambler?entry=lean_development_governance I’ve discussed lean development governance in greater detail.

The strategies that I’ve described are clearly nothing more than common sense, something that can be said of all agile strategies. Sadly, as Mark Twain lamented, common sense isn’t very common in practice.[Read More]

The explicit phases of the Unified Process -- Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition -- and their milestones are important strategies for scaling agile software development to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. Yes, I realize that this is heresy for hard-core agilists who can expound upon the evils of serial development, yet these very same people also take a phased approach to development although are loathe to admit it. The issue is that the UP phases are like seasons of a project: although you'll do the same types of activities all throughout a project, the extent to which you do them and the way in which you do them change depending on your goals. For example, at the beginning of a development project if you want to be effective you need to do basic things like identify the scope of the project, identify a viable architecture strategy, start putting together your team, and obtain support for the project. Towards the end of a project your focus is on the activities surrounding the deployment of your system into production, including end-of-lifecycle testing efforts, training, cleaning up of documentation, piloting the system with a subset of users, and so on. In between you focus on building the system, including analysis, design, testing, and coding of it. Your project clearly progresses through different phases, or call them seasons if the term phase doesn't suit you, whether your team is agile or not.

The UP defines four phases, each of which address a different kind of risk:1. Inception. This phase focuses on addressing business risk by having you drive to scope concurrence amongst your stakeholders. Most projects have a wide range of stakeholdres, and if they don't agree to the scope of the project and recognize that others have conflicting or higher priority needs you project risks getting mired in political infighting. In the Eclipse Way this is called the "Warm Up" iteration and in other agile processes "Iteration 0".2. Elaboration. The goal of this phase is to address technical risk by proving the architecture through code. You do this by building and end-to-end skeleton of your system which implements the highest-risk requirements. Some people will say that this approach isn't agile, that your stakeholders should by the only ones to prioritize requirements. Yes, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are a wide range of stakeholders, including operations people and enterprise architects who are interested in the technical viability of your approach. I've also noticed that the high-risk requirements are often the high-business-value ones anyway, so you usually need to do very little reorganization of your requirements stack.3. Construction. This phase focuses on implementation risk, addressing it through the creation of working software each iteration. This phase is where you put the flesh onto the skeleton.4. Transition. The goal of this phase is to address deployment risk. There is usually a lot more to deploying software than simply copying a few files onto a server, as I indicated above. Deployment is often a complex and difficult task, one which you often need good guidance to succeed at.

Each phase ends with a milestone review, which could be as simple as a short meeting, where you meet with prime stakeholders who will make a "go/no-go" decision regarding your project. They should consider whether the project still makes sense, perhaps the situation has changed, and that you're addressing the project risks appropriately. This is important for "agile in the small" but also for "agile in the large" because at scale your risks are often much greater. Your prime stakeholders should also verify that you have in fact met the criteria for exiting the phase. For example, if you don't have an end-to-end working skeleton of your system then you're not ready to enter the Construction phase. Holding these sorts of milestone reviews improves your IT governance efforts by giving senior management valuable visibility at the level that they actually need: when you have dozens or hundreds of projects underway, you can't attend all of the daily stand up meetings of each team, nor do you even want to read summary status reports.

These milestone reviews enable you to lower project risk. Last Autumn I ran a survey via Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.ddj.com) which explore how people actually define success for IT projects and how successful we really were. We found that when people define success in their own terms that Agile has a 71% success rate compared with 63% for traditional approaches. Although it's nice to that Agile appears to be lower risk than traditional approaches, a 71% success rate still implies a 29% failure rate. The point is that it behooves us to actively monitor development projects to determine if they're on track, and if not either help them to get back on track or cancel them as soon as we possibly can. Hence the importance of occasional milestone reviews where you make go/no-go decisions. If you're interested in the details behind the project, they can be found at http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html .

Done right, phases are critical to your project success, particularly at scale. Yes, the traditional community seems to have gone overboard with phase-based approaches, but that doesn't mean that we need to make the same mistakes. Let's keep the benefit without the cost of needless bureaucracy.[Read More]

During 2007 Per Kroll and myself invested a significant amount of time development a framework for lean development governance. This effort resulted in a series of three articles that were published in Rational Edge and a recently published white paper. The articles go into the various practices in detail whereas the paper provides an overview aimed at executives. I also recently did a webcast which is now available online. The URLs are at the bottom of this blog posting.

Development governance isn’t a sexy topic, but it critical to the success of any IT department. I like to compare traditional, command-and-control approaches to governance to herding cats – you do a bunch of busy work which seems like a great idea in theory, but in the end the cats will ignore your efforts and stay in the room. Yet getting cats out of a room is easy to accomplish, as long as you know what motivates cats. Simply wave some fish in front of their noses and you’ll find that you can lead them out of the room with no effort at all. Effective governance for lean development isn’t about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. It is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to try to force them to do so.

This framework is based on the philosophical foundation provided by the 7 principles proposed in the book “Lean Software Development” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The 7 principles are:1. Eliminate Waste. The three biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of extra features, churn, and crossing organizational boundaries. Crossing organizational boundaries can increase costs by 25% or more because they create buffers which slow down response time and interfere with communication. It is critical that development teams are allowed to organize themselves, and run themselves, in a manner which reflects the work that they’re trying to accomplish. 2. Build Quality In. If you routinely find problems with your verification process then your process must be defective. When it comes to governance, if you regularly find that developers are doing things that you don’t want them to do or are not doing things that they should be then your approach to governance must be at fault. The strategy is not to make governance yet another set of activities that you layer on top of your software process but instead should embed into your process to make it as easy as possible for developers to do the right thing. 3. Create Knowledge. Planning is useful, but learning is essential. 4. Defer Commitment. You do not need to start software development by defining a complete specification, but instead work iteratively. You can support the business effectively through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. This also requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios to capabilities developed in potentially several different applications by different projects. 5. Deliver Fast. It is possible to deliver high-quality systems fast and in a timely manner. By limiting the work of a team to their capacity, by not trying to force them to do more than they are capable but instead ask them to self-organize and thereby determine what they can accomplish, you can establish a reliable and repeatable flow of work. 6. Respect People. Sustainable advantage is gained from engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a human resources strategy which is specific to IT, that you need to focus on enabling teams not on controlling them. 7. Optimize the Whole. If you want to govern your development efforts effectively you must look at the bigger picture, not just individual project teams. You need to understand the high-level business process which the individual systems support, processes which often cross multiple systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so that you can deliver a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well you’re delivering business value, because that is the raison d’etre of your IT department.

Based on our experiences, and guided by the 7 principles, Per Kroll and I identified 18 practices of lean development governance. We've organized these practices into 6 categories:1. The Roles & Responsibilities category: - Promote Self-Organizing Teams. The best people for planning work are the ones who are going to do it. - Align Team Structure With Architecture. The organization of your project team should reflect the desired architectural structure of the system you are building to streamline the activities of the team.

2. The Organization category: - Align HR Policies With IT Values. Hiring, retaining, and promoting technical staff requires different strategies compared to non-technical staff. - Align Stakeholder Policies With IT Values. Your stakeholders may not understand the implications of the decisions that they make, for example that requiring an “accurate” estimate at the beginning of a project can dramatically increase project risk instead of decrease it as intended.

3. The Processes category: - Adapt the Process. Because teams vary in size, distribution, purpose, criticality, need for oversight, and member skillset you must tailor the process to meet a team’s exact needs. - Continuous Improvement. You should strive to identify and act on lessons learned throughout the project, not just at the end. - Embedded Compliance. It is better to build compliance into your day-to-day process, instead of having a separate compliance process that often results in unnecessary overhead. - Iterative Development. An iterative approach to software delivery allows progressive development and disclosure of software components, with a reduction of overall failure risk, and provides an ability to make fine-grained adjustment and correction with minimal lost time for rework. - Risk-Based Milestones. You want to mitigate the risks of your project, in particular business and technical risks, early in the lifecycle. You do this by having throughout your project several milestones that teams work toward.

4. The Measures category: - Simple and Relevant Metrics. You should automate metrics collection as much as possible, minimize the number of metrics collected, and know why you’re collecting them. - Continuous Project Monitoring. Automated metrics gathering enables you to monitor projects and thereby identify potential issues so that you can collaborate closely with the project team to resolve problems early.

5. The Mission & Principles category: - Business-Driven Project Pipeline. You should invest in the projects that are well-aligned to the business direction, return definable value, and match well with the priorities of the enterprise. - Pragmatic Governance Body. Effective governance bodies focus on enabling development teams in a cost-effective and timely manner. They typically have a small core staff with a majority of members being representatives from the governed organizations. - Staged Program Delivery. Programs, which are collections of related projects, should be rolled out in increments over time. Instead of holding back a release to wait for a subproject, each individual subprojects must sign up to predetermined release date. If the subproject misses it skips to the next release, minimizing the impact to the customers of the program. - Scenario-Driven Development. By taking a scenario-driven approach, you can understand how people will actually use your system, thereby enabling you to build something that meets their actual needs. The whole cannot be defined without understanding the parts, and the parts cannot be defined in detail without understanding the whole.

6. The Polices & Standards category: - Valued Corporate Assets. Guidance, such as programming guidelines or database design conventions, and reusable assets such as frameworks and components, will be adopted if they are perceived to add value to developers. You want to make it as easy as possible for developers to comply to, and more importantly take advantage of, your corporate IT infrastructure. - Flexible Architectures. Architectures that are service-oriented, component-based, or object-oriented and implement common architectural and design patterns lend themselves to greater levels of consistency, reuse, enhanceability, and adaptability. - Integrated Lifecycle Environment. Automate as much of the “drudge work”, such as metrics gathering and system build, as possible. Your tools and processes should fit together effectively throughout the lifecycle.

The URLs for the 3 articles:Principles and Organizations: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jun07/kroll/Processes and Measures: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jul07/kroll_ambler/Roles and Policies: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/aug07/ambler_kroll/

The URL for the white paper:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg

The URL for the webcast:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=112907C[Read More]